The Plastic Age Part 31

"He'll hedge," objected Lawrence. "All the profs do if you ask them anything like that." Winsor laughed. "You don't know Jimmie Henley. He won't hedge. You've never had a cla.s.s with him, but Hugh and Pudge and I are all in English Fifty-three, and we'll put it up to him. He'll tell us what he thinks all right, and I hope to G.o.d that he says it is worth while. I'd like to have somebody convince me that I've got something out of these four years beside lower ideals. h.e.l.l, sometimes I think that we're all d.a.m.n fools. We worship athletics--no offense, Hugh--above everything else; we gamble and drink and talk like b.u.ms; and about every so often some fellow has to go home because a lovely lady has left him with bitter, bitter memories. I'm with Henley. If we're the cream of the earth--well, thank the Lord, we're not."

"Who is," Lawrence asked earnestly.

"G.o.d knows."

CHAPTER XXV

English 53 had only a dozen men in it; so Henley conducted the course in a very informal fashion. The men felt free to bring up for discussion any topic that interested them.

n.o.body was surprised, therefore, when George Winsor asked Henley to express his opinion of the value of a college education. He reminded Henley of what he had said two years before, and rapidly gave a resume of the discussion that resulted in the question he was asking. "We'd like to know, too," he concluded, grinning wickedly, "just whom you consider the cream of the earth. You remember you said that if we were you felt sorry for the skimmed milk."

Henley leaned back in his chair and laughed. "Yes," he said, "I remember saying that. I didn't think, though, that you would remember it for two years. You seem to remember most of what I said. I am truly astonished."

He grinned back at Winsor. "The swine seem to have eaten the pearls."

The cla.s.s laughed, but Winsor was not one to refuse the gambit. "They were very indigestible," he said quickly.

"Good!" Henley exclaimed. "I wanted them to give you a belly-ache, and I am delighted that you still suffer."

"We do," Pudge Jamieson admitted, "but we'd like to have a little mercy shown to us now. We've spent four years here, and while we've enjoyed them, we've just about made up our minds that they have been all in all wasted years."

"No." Henley was decisive. His playful manner entirely disappeared. "No, not wasted. You have enjoyed them, you say. Splendid justification. You will continue to enjoy them as the years grow between you and your college days. All men are sentimental about college, and in that sentimentality there is continuous pleasure."

"Your doubt delights me. Your feeling that you haven't learned anything delights me, too. It proves that you have learned a great deal. It is only the ignoramus who thinks he is wise; the wise man knows that he is an ignoramus. That's a plat.i.tude, but it is none the less true. I have cold comfort for you: the more you learn, the less confident you will be of your own learning, the more utterly ignorant you will feel. I have never known so much as, the day I graduated from high school. I held my diploma and the knowledge of the ages in my hand. I had never heard of Socrates, but I would have challenged him to a debate without the slightest fear."

"Since then I have grown more humble, so humble that there are times when I am ashamed to come into the cla.s.s-room. What right have I to teach anybody anything? I mean that quite sincerely. Then I remember that, ignorant as I am, the undergraduates are more ignorant. I take heart and mount the rostrum ready to speak with the authority of a pundit."

He realized that he was sliding off on a tangent and paused to find a new attack. Pudge Jamieson helped him.

"I suppose that's all true," he said, "but it doesn't explain why college is really worth while. The fact remains that most of us don't learn anything, that we are coa.r.s.ened by college, and that we--well, we worship false G.o.ds."

Henley nodded in agreement. "It would be hard to deny your a.s.sertions,"

he acknowledged, "and I don't think that I am going to try to deny them.

Of course, men grow coa.r.s.er while they are in college, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't grow coa.r.s.er if they weren't in college. It isn't college that coa.r.s.ens a man and destroys his illusions; it is life. Don't think that you can grow to manhood and retain your pretty dreams. You have become disillusioned about college. In the next few years you will suffer further disillusionment. That is the price of living."

"Every intelligent man with ideals eventually becomes a cynic. It is inevitable. He has standards, and, granted that he is intelligent, he cannot fail to see how far mankind falls below those standards. The result is cynicism, and if he is truly intelligent, the cynicism is kindly. Having learned that man is frail, he expects little of him; therefore, if he judges at all, his judgment is tempered either with humor or with mercy."

The dozen boys were sprawled lazily in their chairs, their feet resting on the rungs of the chairs before them, but their eyes were fastened keenly on Henley. All that he was saying was of the greatest importance to them. They found comfort in his words, but the comfort raised new doubts, new problems.

"How does that affect college?" Winsor asked.

"It affects it very decidedly," Henley replied. "You haven't become true cynics yet; you expect too much of college. You forget that the men who run the college and the men who attend it are at best human beings, and that means that very much cannot be expected of them. You do worship false G.o.ds. I find hope in the fact that you recognize the stuff of which your G.o.ds are made. I have great hopes for the American colleges, not because I have any reason to believe that the faculties will become wiser or that the administrations will lead the students to true G.o.ds; not at all, but I do think that the students themselves will find a way.

They have already abandoned Mammon; at least, the most intelligent have, and I begin to see signs of less adoration for athletics. Athletics, of course, have their place, and some of the students are beginning to find that place. Certainly the alumni haven't, and I don't believe that the administrative officers have, either. Just so long as athletes advertise the college, the administrations will coddle them. The undergraduates, however, show signs of frowning on professionalism, and the stupid athlete is rapidly losing his prestige. An athlete has to show something more than brawn to be a hero among his fellows nowadays."

He paused, and Pudge spoke up. "Perhaps you are right," he said, "but I doubt it. Athletics are certainly far more important to us than anything else, and the captain of the football team is always the biggest man in college. But I don't care particularly about that. What I want to know is how the colleges justify their existence. I don't see that you have proved that they do."

"No, I haven't," Henley admitted, "and I don't know that I can prove it.

Of course, the colleges aren't perfect, not by a long way, but as human inst.i.tutions go, I think they justify their existence. The four years spent at college by an intelligent boy--please notice that I say intelligent--are well spent indeed. They are gloriously worth while. You said that you have had a wonderful time. Not so wonderful as you think.

It is a strange feeling that we have about our college years. We all believe that they are years of unalloyed happiness, and the further we leave them behind the more perfect they seem. As a matter of fact, few undergraduates are truly happy. They are going through a period of storm and stress; they are torn by _Weltschmerz_. Show me a nineteen-year-old boy who is perfectly happy and you show me an idiot. I rarely get a cheerful theme except from freshmen. Nine tenths of them are expressions of deep concern and distress. A boy's college years are the years when he finds out that life isn't what he thought it, and the finding out is a painful experience. He discovers that he and his fellows are made of very brittle clay: usually he loathes himself; often he loathes his fellows.

"College isn't the Elysium that it is painted in stories and novels, but I feel sorry for any intelligent man who didn't have the opportunity to go to college. There is something beautiful about one's college days, something that one treasures all his life. As we grow older, we forget the hours of storm and stress, the cla.s.s-room humiliations, the terror of examinations, the awful periods of doubt of G.o.d and man--we forget everything but athletic victories, long discussions with friends, campus sings, fraternity life, moonlight on the campus, and everything that is romantic. The sting dies, and the beauty remains.

"Why do men give large sums of money to their colleges when asked?

Because they want to help society? Not at all. The average man doesn't even take that into consideration. He gives the money because he loves his alma mater, because he has beautiful and tender memories of her. No, colleges are far from perfect, tragically far from it, but any inst.i.tution that commands loyalty and love as colleges do cannot be wholly imperfect. There is a virtue in a college that uninspired administrative officers, stupid professors, and alumni with false ideals cannot kill. At times I tremble for Sanford College; there are times when I swear at it, but I never cease to love it."

"If you feel that way about college, why did you say those things to us two years ago?" Hugh asked. "Because they were true, all true. I was talking about the undergraduates then, and I could have said much more cutting things and still been on the safe side of the truth. There is, however, another side, and that is what I am trying to give you now--rather incoherently, I know."

Hugh thought of Cynthia. "I suppose all that you say is true," he admitted dubiously, "but I can't feel that college does what it should for us. We are told that we are taught to think, but the minute we b.u.mp up against a problem in living we are stumped just as badly as we were when we are freshmen."

"Oh, no, not at all. You solve problems every day that would have stumped you hopelessly as a freshman. You think better than you did four years ago, but no college, however perfect, can teach you all the solutions of life. There are no nostrums or cure-alls that the colleges can give for all the ills and sicknesses of life. You, I am afraid, will have to doctor those yourself."

"I see." Hugh didn't altogether see. Both college and life seemed more complicated than he had thought them. "I am curious to know," he added, "just whom you consider the cream of the earth. That expression has stuck in my mind. I don't know why--but it has."

Henley smiled. "Probably because it is such a very badly mixed metaphor.

Well, I consider the college man the cream of the earth."

"What?" four of the men exclaimed, and all of them sat suddenly upright.

"Yes--but let me explain. If I remember rightly, I said that if you were the cream of the earth, I hoped that G.o.d would pity the skimmed milk.

Well, everything taken into consideration, I do think that you are the cream of the earth; and I have no hope for the skimmed milk. Perhaps it isn't wise for me to give public expression to my pessimism, but you ought to be old enough to stand it."

"The average college graduate is a pretty poor specimen, but all in all he is just about the best we have. Please remember that I am talking in averages. I know perfectly well that a great many brilliant men do not come to college and that a great many stupid men do come, but the colleges get a very fair percentage of the intelligent ones and a comparatively small percentage of the stupid ones. In other words, to play with my mixed metaphor a bit, the cream is very thin in places and the skimmed milk has some very thick clots of cream, but in the end the cream remains the cream and the milk the milk. Everything taken into consideration, we get in the colleges the young men with the highest ideals, the loftiest purpose."

"You want to tell me that those ideals are low and the purpose materialistic and selfish. I know it, but the average college graduate, I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the college gives him those ideals. I can't, however. The colleges draw the best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best."

"Oh, I don't know," a student interrupted. "How about Edison and Ford and--"

"And Shakspere and Sophocles," Henley concluded for him. "Edison is an inventive genius, and Ford is a business genius. Genius hasn't anything to do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and Edison bigger men, though they couldn't have made them lesser geniuses."

"No, we must not take the exceptional man as a standard; we've got to talk about the average. The hand of the Potter shook badly when he made man. It was at best a careless job. But He made some better than others, some a little less weak, a little more intelligent. All in all, those are the men that come to college. The colleges ought to do a thousand times more for those men than they do do; but, after all, they do something for them, and I am optimistic enough to believe that the time will come when they will do more."

"Some day, perhaps," he concluded very seriously, "our administrative officers will be true educators; some day perhaps our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; some day perhaps our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth. That day will be the millennium. I look for the undergraduates to lead us to it."

CHAPTER XXVI

The college year swept rapidly to its close, so rapidly to the seniors that the days seemed to melt in their grasp. The twentieth of June would bring them their diplomas and the end of their college life. They felt a bit chesty at the thought of that B.S. or A.B., but a little sentimental at the thought of leaving "old Sanford."

Suddenly everything about the college became infinitely precious--every tradition; every building, no matter how ugly; even the professors, not just the deserving few--all of them.

Hugh took to wandering about the campus, sometimes alone, thinking of Cynthia, sometimes with a favored crony such as George Winsor or Pudge Jamieson. He didn't see very much of Norry the last month or two of college. He was just as fond of him as ever, but Norry was only a junior; he would not understand how a fellow felt about Sanford when he was on the verge of leaving her. But George and Pudge did understand.

The boys didn't say much as they wandered around the buildings, merely strolled along, occasionally pausing to laugh over some experience that had happened to one of them in the building they were pa.s.sing.